Matisse and Picasso paired off - but no match

By TOM LUBBOCK

Beard, baldy; man in suit, man in underpants; colourist, graphic; homebody, lout - however you put it, Matisse and Picasso are usually taken for very different artists, the polar and complementary opposites of Modernist painting. So there's a surprise already in the exhibition's name - MatissePicasso - which sounds like a PR firm, and suggests a single common enterprise.

The two met in the 1900s, Matisse in his late-thirties, Picasso his mid-twenties, with 12 years between them. They followed each other's work until Matisse's death in 1954. There's a good story here of rivalry and respect, sympathy across distance, a mutual feeling that the other was the only serious competition and also the only one who really understood - and I'm not immune to the romance of the "star friendship", as Nietzsche called such lofty bondings. Still, there is also some art to see and think about at the Tate Modern exhibition.

The first thing you notice, apart from the crowds, is that a third artist (or composite artist) has been at work - the curator, leaving everywhere a distinctive mark: juxtaposition. All the works here are shown in matching pairs or larger clusters.

Pictures are matched by imagery, or style, or composition. Here are some portraits with mask-like faces, Picasso's sturdy Gertrude Stein opposite Matisse's grey-faced wife. Here's a group of small green landscapes. Here are some monumental bodies. Here are two still-lives, both with fruit and a vessel. Here are some seated nudes.

This unrelenting connectivity can be a bit nagging, and the connections are sometimes slight. (Surely Matisse's Music and Picasso's Serenade have nothing important in common, beyond a figure with a guitar?) But, equally, they are often worth making.

MatissePicasso has a strict agenda - to show the common ground where Matisse and Picasso intersect. Those parts of either artist's work that have no echo in the other's are excluded. Matisse's fauvism, Picasso's early "analytical" cubism get little or no showing here. And some periods, especially the 1910s and 1920s, get more attention than others.

This is a show about an artistic relationship, a conscious dialogue of two artists who for almost 50 years kept an eye on what the other was up to. How Matisse learned from Picasso's fragmentations of the picture space ... How Picasso appropriated the dreamy woman-in-a-room motif ... and that's an interesting idea for an exhibition.

Or rather, for a book. For an exhibition, it's the kind of critical theme that can't be demonstrated practically on a gallery wall. You can catch flashes of the artistic dialogue, but what emerges from MatissePicasso is something simpler and more surprising.

The artists may have been intensely competitive, but we surely are supposed to see here an interaction of equals. Putting them side by side, the show is certainly not trying to encourage a decision as to which one is better. If you'd asked me in advance, I'd have said I was expecting more excitement from Picasso. Matisse, yes, lovely, but just a bit too steady, too dreamy, too harmonious. While Picasso, for all his frenzied aggro and his toilet humour, would easily win through bodily force, pictorial wit, passion. Picasso, at least, will not be the boring one.

You need walk through only a few rooms, not looking hard, not going close, to realise that, for sheer coming-off-the-wall presence, the Matisses are enormously stronger than the Picassos.

Whatever else you feel about the cunningly arranged matches, the striking thing is that they are so unequal. It's hard to think of any common cause. The Matisses are radiant, deep and full. Beside them the Picassos look poky, meagre. The condensed power of Gertrude Stein (1908) is simply inert compared to Madame Matisse (1913). One is only an image, the other a luminous arrival.

Now you may say, "No surprise". Matisse, we all know, is the colourist. An art of colour will always have more impact than an art of shade and solid volume such as Picasso's.

True, I suppose - though Matisse's radiance isn't just a matter of boldness or brightness or contrast, but of the intense tuning of one colour with another. But in other aspects Matisse wins, too. Even on the terms by which Picasso is normally judged clearly stronger - Picasso the endlessly inventive, Matisse the excessively decorative - Matisse is superior.

The ways that Picasso organises a picture are extremely dull. He puts the thing in the middle of the scene, or he sets two or three things symmetrically, or he fills up the surface area almost evenly.

Picasso thinks in terms of the motif, to which the rest of the picture is then added. Matisse thinks of the whole picture together, and of every element as a part of it, with its own part to play.

It's possible that the agenda of MatissePicasso casts a bias. When Matisse and Picasso intersect, does the best of Picasso go and the best of Matisse remain? I feel that those World War I Matisses (made partly in response to Picasso's experiments) are rightly revealed as among the top 20th-century paintings.

But it was curious to leaf through the catalogue afterwards and see all the Matisses, drained of their lustre by reproduction, looking now much less vivid than the Picassos.

* MatissePicasso - Tate Modern, London, until August 18.

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